Stanley Grauman Weinbaum was born on April 4, 1902, in Louisville, Kentucky.

At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Stanley G. Weinbaum studied chemical engineering, but then he switched to English. He left the university in 1923 when it was discovered that, on a bet, he had taken an exam for a friend.

Stanley G. Weinbaum decided to become a writer, and his debut was with a romantic novel titled “The Lady Dances,” published under the pseudonym Marge Stanley, the name of his wife joined with his.

Stanley G. Weinbaum’s debut in the field of science fiction, of which he was a fan, came in 1934 with the publication of the story “A Martian Odyssey”. Weinbaum was immediately acclaimed by readers and critics because his story included a Martian who was really alien physically and also mentally.

At the time, aliens typically looked like humans and were often dull villains that served only to highlight the protagonists’ heroism. Instead, the Martian Tweel was perhaps the first alien produced with real imagination, actually different from human beings and not a villain. In “A Martian Odyssey,” there are also other really exotic alien creatures, including some silicon-based rather than carbon-based.

In the following months, Stanley G. Weinbaum published other stories such as “Valley of Dreams”, the sequel to “A Martian Odyssey”, and “The Red Peri”. In 1935, he published the stories of the “Ham” Hammond and Patricia Burlingame series: “The Parasite Planet”, “The Lotus Eaters”, and “The Planet of Doubt”, set on Venus and Uranus and containing other fanciful descriptions of alien ecosystems inhabited by exotic creatures.

Unfortunately, in the summer of 1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum was struck by what at first was considered to be pneumonia but then turned out to be lung cancer. Weinbaum died on December 14, 1935.

Various works of Stanley G. Weinbaum were published posthumously, such as the two novels in the Black Margot series, “Dawn of Flame” and “The Black Flame”.

Some of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s works are now freely downloadable from the website of Project Gutenberg or from ManyBooks.net.

In his life, unfortunately so short, Stanley G. Weinbaum was able to write only a handful of stories but with his extraordinary imagination and the ability to build a consistent way really alien worlds greatly influenced the field of science fiction. At the time, many stories, really naive and full of stereotypes, were published, while the ones written by Weinbaum were of far higher quality.